


Clarity

by chrissie0707



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, Hurt Dean, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-18 20:31:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7329670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrissie0707/pseuds/chrissie0707
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her fingers twitch in the direction of her phone, thinking again she should tell Dean exactly where he can stick this bull-headed macho act, because, minors cuts and scrapes, okay, but she is so not equipped to deal with a gunshot wound in the middle of a dirty barroom. Missing scene, S2, BUABS. H/C but also a character study. Some language.  Originally posted March 2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clarity

"God, you weigh, like, four hundred pounds," she mutters, breath clouding in front of her face and muscles screaming uncle as they stagger-climb the squat steps to the bar's delivery entrance, a short walk from the pier that should have taken five minutes but clocked in at nearly twenty.

His frustration is almost more palpable than his very obvious pain. "You should've been watchin' the car," he grits, leaning on the railing while she fumbles with the knob. "See which way he went."

"Yeah, well, I got sorta distracted by the gunshot," Jo huffs back, giving up and kicking in the door. She adjusts her grip on Dean's water-logged coat, lake water pooling in the dents her fingers are making in the fabric.

He trips on the threshold, sends them stumbling sideways into the bar. He can't stop the momentum of his weight, and she ends up sandwiched between him and the ledge of the bar, crying out as her shoulder blades are ground roughly into the polished wood. _Ow. Fuck, that's gonna leave a mark._

"Sorry." He's trying to get his feet back under him, pushes off the counter.

"Don't worry about it." She fists the front of his coat, braces her foot at the base of the bar and shoves up at the same time, sets a course for the nearest chair, lets Dean do little more than fall into it so she can step back and assess the situation.

He's soaked, freezing, and pale as the moon with deep lines etched at the corners of his eyes, gripping his left shoulder and shivering from some combination of cold and pain. He reads the disbelief in her expression, shakes his head. "It wasn't Sam."

"Yeah, right, I know." She's shivering, too, a little, half of her clothing cold and wet, half of her long hair damp and curling. "Okay…just hang tight there for a sec and I'm gonna call 911." She pulls her phone from her jacket pocket and is stopped before she can press any buttons, bloody fingers tightening around her arm almost hard enough to hurt.

"No," Dean grits. "Don't do that, just…" His eyes search the bar with the frightened ferocity of a cornered animal, and it scares her. "Just get me something from the bar and see if this dive has a first aid kit."

Jo shakes off his hand and steps back out of his reach. She stomps her foot, the heel of her boot against the wooden floorboard echoing through the room. "No, Dean, you need – "

"Jo." Loudly, white fist clenched on the tabletop. "Please. I need to find him, fast. I can't…" The look in his eyes is indescribable, infuriates her and tugs at her heart all at the same time.

"Fine," she relents with an angry sigh. _Stupid, stubborn hard-headed assholes._ Every single hunter she's ever met. Her dad, even. She clomps behind the bar and grabs the first full bottle she sees, something with a crow on the label, and starts toward the office.

A sharp whistle stops her, turns her back to the room. He waves his good arm, motions her over. "Bring that here first."

"Right." She sets the bottle gently on the table and he grabs it up immediately, realizes just as quickly he doesn't have the two good hands necessary to twist off the cap by himself. Jo reaches out, opens the bottle for him.

He nods a brief thanks, tips his head back to allow a big gulp of room temperature whiskey to do its patented pain-dulling thing.

"My dad used to like the whiskey for this part, too," she says without thinking. Has to be without thinking, considering the last conversation they had.

The bottle thunks heavily to the table, and his swallow is audible. "First aid kit?"

"Yeah, in back." She goes back to Mick's office, where the emergency case is in the bottom drawer of his desk. "We've broken up a couple of a fights," she calls out to Dean as she retrieves the kit and starts back toward the table. "The lowlifes hit the road, and the good guys get – "

"Nurse Jo's special bedside manner?" he cracks tiredly, but not without bite.

She drops the case to the table and it's just reflex, the playful punch she throws, but he folds in on himself like a paper menu, hisses and holds his shoulder tightly, white-knuckling through a wave of pain.

"I'm sorry, Dean, I didn't mean to – "

"S'okay, really. I deserved that." Through clenched teeth, shaking his head. "Okay, have a seat."

She swallows, unzips her jacket and pulls out of it, tosses it aside. She sits, pops open the case. "I assume you've done this before?"

He grins, almost. "Not exactly this, believe it or not. But I can talk you through it." He moves to shrug out of his coat, gets his right arm free but glances over sheepishly, stuck at the left.

Jo jumps up from her chair, pulls at the damp collar of his coat, gently tugs the sleeve down his arm, revealing a bloodstain on his shirt the size of her fist. "Oh, God," she breathes. Her fingers twitch in the direction of her phone, thinking again she should tell Dean exactly where he can stick this bull-headed macho act, because, minors cuts and scrapes, okay, but she is so not equipped to deal with a gunshot wound in the middle of a dirty barroom.

"Not as bad as it looks," he says, like he knows what she's thinking. "It'll be a piece of cake."

She doesn't believe him, but helps him out of the button-down. "Yeah, sure."

"Okay, now cut…" He makes a scissoring motion with his right hand, gives up and drops it heavily to the bottle of whiskey. "Just cut." He brings the whiskey to his lips.

"I think I can manage that." A couple swift cuts with the medical scissors, and the sleeve of his dark t-shirt falls open like curtains, exposes a small neat hole in the fleshy spot just below the shoulder joint. A thin trickle of blood pumps deceptively slow from the wound. She can't help herself, brushes tentative fingers along his shoulder blade, doesn't find a partnering hole there marking the bullet's exit. "Looks like it's still in there."

He barks a humorless laugh. "Yeah, I can feel it." His fingers tighten around the neck of the bottle as he nods down at the long tweezers in the case. "Now just get in there and get the little bitch."

Jo can feel the blood draining from her face. "Dean, I don't think I can – "

"Hey, Jo, look at me." His hand is cold on her arm, and his stare is intense, bright. "You can do this."

He's playing tough for her, and she figures the least she can do is repay the favor, seeing as how he probably saved her life. She straightens in her chair, takes a deep breath. "Okay. Yeah, sure, piece of cake, right?"

Tweezers in the hole, and she has to start talking to keep from vomiting, to keep from focusing on the sound of flesh and everything underneath ripping as she pokes and prods with the sharp tip and the accompanying unprotected noises of pain coming from the only person she's ever met who's tough enough to remind her of her dad. She remembers the front her mom would put on when faced with this task. She'd break down later when Dad was sleeping it off and she didn't know Jo was watching, red-faced and shaking with sobs, but in the moment it was always stern smacks and, _William Harvelle, sit still and give me two minutes to patch you up before you bleed to death all over the kitchen floor I just finished mopping._

So she bites her lip and bitches and chides and he grips the edge of the table and calls her a butcher and he's probably not wrong. She no idea what kind of mess she's made of the muscle and tissue inside as she searched for the bullet.

But it's out now and Dean's making like he's gonna walk out of there with a leaky hole cutting halfway through his upper body and she channels her mother, snaps at him just like Mom snapped at Dad, and it works, pins him back in his seat. But the thought of Dad dovetails back to all of the horrible things Sam, or the demon inside him, had said, and she's young enough to still be predominantly selfish, so while jamming a gauze pad into the hole it's, do demons ever tell the truth?

Because she wants to take advantage of the situation, wants to get an unfiltered answer that will put her mind at ease, something like, _nope, legit liars, every goddamn one. Don't listen to anything they ever say, especially when they say I see you like a sister and my dad shot your dad in the head._ She gets something unfiltered, an honest-to-God honest answer because he's too tired for anything else, but it isn't exactly what she's looking for.

_Why do I ask, Dean? Because I'm pretty sure your dad didn't just let my dad die, I'm pretty sure your dad killed him._ But that's her problem, not his, so it's, "Nothing," that comes out of her mouth. "Doesn't matter."

She's only been on her own a few months now, but it feels like a year since she's seen a friendly face, and she isn't ready to break it up now. She wants to hunt, and this is a demon, damn it, about as real as it gets and threatening her friends. Or, people that could maybe be friends if she can keep her emotions in check. She presses down the last piece of tape and hops to her feet. _Okay, I'm all in now so let's go get Sam._

When he laughs Jo wants to slug him, gimpy arm and all, but can't see that adding much to the equation at this point. She should follow him out, ride this adrenaline high and be whatever weak-assed idea of backup she can manage, but he won't have it.

She stomps her foot again, sure she's driving home just how young and ill-notioned she is about this whole thing but it's obvious he isn't letting her out the door so she doesn't have anything left to lose. "Wait."

There are a dozen things she wants to say, all of them selfish, none of them relevant. She breaks eye contact, gaze dropping to the open case on the table, its thrown-about contents. She's going to have to cough up a month's tips to cover the cost of the Vicodin, but it's the only thing she has to give him that he'll take.

He won't call and he doesn't want her blood on his hands, but his is all over hers, and it takes a while to scrub it all from her fingers, but that's just the blood, and that's just her hands. She doesn't know she's crying until there's still water falling after she turns off the tap. She runs hot, pink hands through her tangled hair, brings about a fresh sting of tears to her eyes when they connect with the goose egg on her forehead and all of a sudden her head HURTS.

She'd been having a pretty good night before Sam walked in, the only bartendress in a room full of horny pricks with fat wallets. Now she's going to have to leave the entire wad of cash for Mick if she has a hope in hell of keeping this job, but it won't scratch the surface of covering the damages.

The bar is a mess. There are knife holes in the posts and there's glass. Everywhere. Beer bottles shattered into shimmery powder and the front picture window splintered into a million pieces. The glass tinkles like a music box as she sweeps it into a dustpan.

_I can't do this. Can't do it._

It might just be the bump to the head or the suddenly ALONE feeling but Jo throws the broom to the floor with a loud clatter and grabs the receiver from the unit on the wall, dials the first number anyone memorizes.

Maybe if her mom had picked up on the first ring, but she doesn't, and Jo has enough time before the second ring to think, _I CAN do it. I did this_ , and she disconnects the call.

**********************************************************

_End_


End file.
